


It’s Not What It Looks Like

by Imgonnabeyourbubblegumwitch



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 04:17:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12051150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imgonnabeyourbubblegumwitch/pseuds/Imgonnabeyourbubblegumwitch
Summary: Nico and Will keep getting caught kissing. It's not what it looks like though, until that one time when it kind of is.





	It’s Not What It Looks Like

**Author's Note:**

> For the request on tumblr: 
> 
> “Omg please can you do Jason and/or percy bursting in on Nico and Will having a heavy makeout? I’m laughing just thinking bout how uncomfortable Jason is, how mortified Nico is and Percy and Will just being little giggling shits”

Nico threw another piece of popcorn at his boyfriend who batted it away without taking his eyes away from the screen. Nico sighed heavily and slumped back against the wall. They were watching a film in Will’s cabin, sitting together on the bed. Nico could usually cope with Will’s film choices, even the musicals, but he just couldn’t get into this one. It didn’t help the screen on the laptop, that combined effort from the Hermes and Hephaestus cabins had hacked, bashed and rewired to get wifi without the monster attention, was tiny. Plus the colour palette for the movie was, and he couldn’t believe he was saying this, too dull and could have done with some colour.

Will liked it though, and for a while Nico had been content with watching Will watch the movie. Nico liked watching emotions flicker across his face: surprise, fear, happiness. However, even that got boring and Nico began throwing popcorn at Will instead.

“Get lost!” Will complained, as a piece hit his cheek. He shoved at Nico without looking, but just ended up upending the bowl. Nico picked up another kernel from the blankets.

“This film is really boring,” Nico complained, aiming for the hood of Will’s jacket.

“I was going to suggest we do something else,” Will said. “But then you started throwing popcorn so now you can just deal with it.”

“Piper said relationships were supposed to be about compromise,” Nico told him.

“I’m compromising by not kicking you out of my cabin for being annoying,” Will answered, still refusing to take his eyes off the screen. “Now shut up! I’m trying to watch.”

Nico huffed and threw another piece at Will. Will didn’t react. Nico shoved his shoulder lightly. Will swayed but still didn’t look away from the screen. Nico took that as a challenge and judging by the slight smirk on Will’s face, Will knew it.

He lunged at Will meaning to shove him off the bed, but Will anticipated that and knocked him back while he was off balance. Nico fell, grabbing at Will’s arm as he went. If he was going down, Will was going down with him.

He landed with a heavy thud that jarred his back, Will collapsing on top of him in an ungraceful heap half a second later. Nico groaned as all the air whooshed out of his lungs.

“You are so heavy,” he told Will, trying to shove his boyfriend off of him. He heard the door open, and Will tried to get up in response but they were awkwardly tangled and he just fell back down again with a huff and a giggle.

“Nico?” Hazel called, “Jason said you were – oh my gods!”

Will had by now dissolved into full on hysterics and so was utterly useless.

“It’s not what it looks like!” Nico said quickly renewing his efforts to relocate Will. He eventually manged to push Will to the side, sitting up so he could face Hazel. She was backing towards the door, her cheeks bright red and a hand over her mouth.

“We were just – I pushed Will and – we weren’t –!”

He looked at Will, who was slowly pulling himself up, using the bed as an anchor. His boyfriend was making a token effort not to find the situation funny but he was having to press his lips together so tightly they were bloodless and his shoulders were shaking with the effort.

“Help me!” Nico instructed.

Will could only shrug.

“You’re literally the worst and I don’t know why I’m dating you,” Nico told him. That just made Will laugh more.

* * *

Will had been suffering from nightmares. He claimed he wasn’t sure what had set them off but Nico thought it might have been because Will had lost his first patient in over six months: a small girl who had arrived at camp bleeding out from a cyclops attack. Will had done all he could, but the girl had made it to safety just a little too late.

Day to day Will was dealing with it in a surprisingly healthy fashion. He insisted that he wasn’t naïve and knew he’d lose many more people over his career, and that he knew it wasn’t his fault. It was all very well saying the words, and Nico had no doubt that in the daylight Will truly meant them. If Will was going to be a doctor he was going to have to face death Nico knew that, perhaps better than most. He just thought that night time Will wasn’t quite subscribed to the same world view as day time Will.

He’d asked Will what his nightmares were about but Will had just shrugged and become evasive. He did know Will was no longer getting much sleep and eventually he’d turned up in Will’s cabin and sat by his side. It meant Nico didn’t get much sleep either, but he was there for Will when Will woke himself up screaming, which gave Kayla and Austin a break from the aftermath of Will’s night terrors.

No matter how much sleep Will got he was awake with the dawn, some days more gracefully than others, and that meant Nico was up too. The two went up to breakfast together, for once both in dire need of coffee. Usually it was just Nico who stumbled around like the zombies he’d summoned before he was able to choke down the most bitter concentrated drink Chiron would allow him to make. Today Will was as zoned out as he was and in desperate need of caffeine.

Piper was sitting on the Hades table when they arrived. She glanced at Nico.

“Are you alright?” she asked. “Hazel said you weren’t in your cabin last night. We were worried.”

“Oh I slept with Will last night,” Nico answered without thinking.

Piper’s face was a picture, running through several emotions almost simultaneously. She swallowed her juice with difficulty and tried to form a question as Will burst out laughing.

“That’s not what I meant,” Nico said with a sigh, pre-empting her. “That’s not – I was in his cabin. Will! Tell her!”

Will didn’t because he was still laughing as he stirred his coffee. Nico wanted to call him a brat but he kind of liked that Will was smiling again so he let it be and settled for sulking in silence instead.

* * *

“On your left,” Nico said.

Will twisted and knocked an arrow out of the air with the end of his bow. Since dating Nico, Will had spent more time training with the others instead of just tending to the Infirmary. Seeing Will in battle, even if it was the simulated battle of capture the flag, still made Nico nervous and brought up all his fears about people he cared about being stolen from him. But he had to admit, Will  _was_  good. He would describe himself as untalented, but that was in comparison to his siblings. Nico was as confident as he was ever going to be given his total paranoia about people close to him, that Will could handle himself.

It helped the Ares cabin really weren’t as talented archers as the Apollo lot and tended to miss more than they hit. They made up for it, however, with quantity and large amounts of aggression.

Will pulled Nico to the side, as an arrow thudded into a tree and Nico began to really appreciate Will’s ability to calculate trajectories.

“We must be pretty close,” Nico said. “Or they wouldn’t be wasting all this effort.”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “They’re no Annabeth. Who knows if they actually have a plan?”

Nico smirked.

“Fair point,” he began to say, but suddenly there was a whooshing noise and he was pulled in towards an unassuming tree like it had suddenly acquired a gravitational pull. He thought for a moment he was the only one affected but then Will was plucked from his position too. They were both dragged in and ended up stuck fast to the tree.

Will was really close. Nico could see every individual eyelash, count every freckle, see every fleck of darker blue in Will’s irises. Despite the situation he felt a stupid impulse to kiss his boyfriend, which was quickly dampened by the sound of footsteps and the recollection that they weren’t alone.

“It worked!” a small, shrill voice crowed.

“Harley!” Nico snapped, trying to pull away from the tree and failing. “What have you done?”

“You fell into my trap!” the little pipsqueak said, emerging from a clump of trees but hanging back what was apparently a safe distance. “There’s a high-powered magnet on the back and it’s attracting the metal of your armour! How cool is that?”

Nico thought that if he ever got out of this he was going to lock Harley in a cupboard somewhere where he couldn’t cause trouble.

“Super cool,” Will said in his best appeasing-small-evil-children voice, “Now since you know it works, maybe you could let us out?”

“No way!” Harley said. “Then you’d be free to take our flag! I’ll come and get you later.”

Harley didn’t give them time to argue or bargain, just turned and began to scamper off. Nico thought it would probably be considered uncultured and morally wrong to swear at little kids, but even so he came very  _very_  close.

“Now what?” he asked as Harley’s footsteps faded into the distance.

Will sighed.

“We’re screwed,” he said.

Kayla found them what felt like days later but what was really, she later assured him, merely half an hour. She immediately burst out laughing when she saw them.

“If you two want some room…”

“It’s not what it looks like,” Nico told her dully. “Now quit laughing and get us out.”

“Are you sure?” Kayla asked. “You two don’t want another a couple of minutes?”

“Don’t be a brat Kayla,” Will said but he was starting to laugh too, probably at the exasperation on Nico’s face and the way his cheeks were reddening. Will Solace was a terrible person.

Kayla grinned but shimmied out of her armour and came over to turn the magnet off.

“I have no idea how to work this thing,” she admitted. “So you two might want to get comfortable.”

“You’re hilarious Kayla,” Nico said sarcastically.

“I try,” Kayla answered. Nico couldn’t see her but he just knew she was grinning brightly.

* * *

“Will?” Nico asked.

Will turned to him. He’d been reading for the last five minutes, and Nico had been watching him toy with the corner of the page for the last three. In the dim light of the Hades cabin, Will practically glowed like the baby sun he was. He had managed to sit in the only patch of sunlight, weak though it was from having to filter in through the thin curtains. It caught in his hair, highlighted his freckles, made his eyes shine. It made him beautiful.

Nico sometimes wondered if the shadows did the same to him. They’d probably hide the darkness under his eyes for a start.  

“Nico?” Will prompted.

Nico had forgotten what he was going to say. He compromised by kissing Will.

“What was that for?” Will asked, when Nico pulled away.

Nico shrugged, shook his head. Dust floated past, golden in the evening sun. Nico  _really_  needed to clean.

Will gave him an odd look.

“Nico? What’s going on in your head?”

What was going on was that he sometimes had trouble believing Will was his. And sometimes he hated camp because he liked Will, he liked Will  _a lot_ but he wasn’t the kind for public affection and a lot of the time they were nothing more than a stolen kiss here and there. And that bothered him. Sometimes he missed Will when he was right next to him.

“Nico? You’re starting to scare me.”

Nico looked at his boyfriend, his beautiful stupid boyfriend and his heart suddenly felt very full of something he wasn’t quite ready to name or think about. Instead he took Will’s book away and hesitantly, slightly afraid for no real reason that Will would push him away, moved to sit on Will’s lap.

Will still looked slightly confused, but the worry drained from his face and he stated to smile. He waited to see what Nico would do though, and Nico kind of adored him for that. And so he kissed him.

He’d kissed Will before plenty of times, and it had always been amazing but this was – different somehow. Maybe it was that strange, fledging, fragile new feeling that was making his chest swell. He finally thought he got all those stupid descriptions he’d read of kissing, that it was like fireworks, like the earth moving. He lo- _liked_  Will so much it made his chest ache, and he knew he never wanted to pull away. His hands found Will’s hair and somehow he’d forgotten how soft it was, but he was happy to remind himself.

He didn’t even register the door bursting open and crashing against the wall, until Jason started talking and it was far too late.

“Nico you’ll never guess – oh!” Jason came to a very sudden stop. There was a dull thud and someone, and oh gods it sounded like Percy, muttered a quiet oath.  

“Jason what -“ Percy said before stopping equally dead.

There was a moment of complete silence. It was so utterly, horrendously quiet that Nico thought he might have heard time passing, heard the blood rushing up to turn his face scarlet. He thought he might even have felt the ground stir, perhaps responding to his very pressing desire for the earth to swallow him up.

He tried to shove Will off of him, then remembered that it was actually him who was sitting on Will’s lap and he hadn’t thought he could get any redder but from the heat in his cheeks his face was giving it a good go. He scrambled up, moving away from Will like his boyfriend was radioactive.

“It’s not what it looks like?” Will tried, with a cheeky, devastating smirk that Nico hated him for.

“Oh my gods!” Percy said. Nico’s eyes shot to him as Percy just collapsed into laughter.

Jason glanced at Percy. He was possibly redder than Nico, rubbing at the back of his neck awkwardly and trying to pull Percy out of the room with little success. He could barely look at Nico, didn’t know where to look at all: his eyes darted all over the place rather than rest on Nico or Will.

“Has someone given you the talk boys?” Percy asked, through peals of laughter.

“I’m in charge of the infirmary,” Will said. “If anything, I’d be the one  _giving_  the talk. You want me to go through it with you and Annabeth?”

Percy aimed a finger gun at Will conceding the point, still laughing hysterically as he did so. Will was starting to crack now too, his shoulders shaking. Nico shoved his side irritably, wondered how Will could be so calm when Jason and Percy were in his cabin and they saw, oh gods they  _saw_. Shoving Will only served to break him though, and he began giggling.

“I hate you,” Nico told him sulkily.

“Didn’t look like it!” Percy quipped. Jason gave him a frustrated look and Percy put up his hands in surrender.

“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t help it.”  

Jason did not look happy and pulled again at Percy’s arm and he finally succeeded in dragging Percy from the cabin.

“I really do hate you,” Nico said, dropping to the floor as his legs finally gave up.

“That’s such a lie,” Will said, and gave him a kiss.  


End file.
